People of the Great Depression by Elizabeth Ford

The 1930’s were very tough to survive through Businessmen and city workers lost jobs, so badly to the point that there were families that went starving. Men would have to wait in lines for hours to get a piece of bread.  Soon the Jobless became the homeless. Children left home because their parents could not afford to feed another mouth. Schools went bankrupt and eventually closed. The children would have nowhere to go, so they would jump the railroads. By the early 1930's, riding the rails became an epidemic, even though it was dangerous and illegal. In 1932, the Southern Pacific Railroad threw half a million transients off their boxcars, many of them teenagers.

Uys, Errol Lincoln, "Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression." Routledge, New York, 2003